Art Column
Yangjiang Group & Zhang Huan
Saturday, February 21st, 2015 Art Column,In Sydney the word “event” is always an understatement. The calendar is packed with one event after another, most of them growing more extravagant with each passing year. The procession begins with the Sydney Festival in January and continues until Christmas sends everyone home for a few days before the streets are packed again for […]
A Fine Possession: Jewellery and Identity
Saturday, February 14th, 2015 Art Column,A Fine Possession: Jewellery and Identity at the Powerhouse Museum has been the great word-of-mouth exhibition over the summer. There have been many enquiries as to when I’d be reviewing this show, which I’ve been keeping in reserve – partly because it’s tempting to hold back on an exhibition that runs until September, and partly […]
James Turrell: A Retrospective
Saturday, February 7th, 2015 Art Column,Light is the crucial element for almost every great painter, from Caravaggio to Turner to Monet. Manipulating paint on canvas to convincingly reproduce the effects of sunshine or darkness is a skill that separates the master from the amateur. In Australian art one thinks of the blaze of light in Streeton’s early paintings, or the […]
McClelland Sculpture Survey & Awards 2014
Saturday, January 31st, 2015 Art Column,It is the ambition of the McClelland Sculpture Park + Gallery, according to its director, Robert Lindsay, to be the national focus of sculpture and Australia’s leading sculpture park. While Sydney’s annual Sculpture By the Sea might covet the first title, the McClelland’s only serious competition as an outdoor display is probably the Heide Museum […]
Jean Paul Gaultier
Saturday, January 24th, 2015 Art Column,There are fashion designers such as the enigmatic Martin Margiela who refuse to be photographed or to give interviews. Then there is Jean Paul Gaultier, the only designer to have hosted a weekly TV program, presented the MTV Europe Music Awards, and recorded a house music hit song called ‘Aow Tou Dou Zat’. Like Andy […]
Yang Fudong: Filmscapes
Saturday, January 17th, 2015 Art Column,Australian public galleries had to work hard to attract audiences last year, but in 2015 the degree of difficulty will crank up a few more notches. In such a climate institutions feel pressured to take a more populist approach – preferring shows that will appeal to a non-specialist audience over displays perceived as difficult or […]
Future Beauty
Saturday, January 10th, 2015 Art Column,In the catalogue for Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Rei Kawakubo is named as the world’s most influential living fashion designer. Although she gives few interviews, Kawakubo did submit to a 2005 New Yorker profile by Judith Thurman in which there is a telling comparison with […]
Fashion Icons
Saturday, December 13th, 2014 Art Column,“We invent nothing,” said Christian Dior, the man who revolutionised fashion in the twentieth century, “we always start from something that has come before.” This refreshing admission seems an appropriate place to begin discussing the round of fashion shows dominating Australia’s art museums this summer. The essential exhibition is Fashion Icons: Masterpieces from the Collection […]
Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial 2014
Saturday, December 6th, 2014 Art Column,One cannot travel very far in any discussion of drawing without coming across a famous statement from the great Neo-classicist, Jacques-Auguste-Dominique Ingres: “Drawing is the probity of art.” “Probity’ means both ‘correctness’ and ‘goodness’, but also ‘moral integrity’, which allows us to imagine Ingres was saying: “to thine own self be true.” This Shakespearean motto […]
Matthew Barney
Saturday, November 29th, 2014 Art Column,“If you read Ancient Evenings for the story,” wrote Harold Bloom, in an insightful review of Norman Mailer’s most notorious novel, “you will hang yourself.” Having ground my way through 150 pages of this flawed magnum opus I can see exactly what he means. Mailer spent ten years on a sprawling story of ancient Egypt […]